These “subtle” skills that foster leadership from the heart

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Faced with the pitfall of top-down and top-down leadership, new practices and ways of acting are appearing, more oriented towards the other.

In recent years, we have come up against a still narrow vision of leadership where the leader must be the “strong”, the “knowledgeable”, the “good communicator”. A leader who knows how to mobilize and create “followership” thanks to his expertise. We too often forget that behind this fantasy of superheroic leadership, there is a human being who, most of the time, has spent his life storing knowledge without worrying too much about its application and above all, without caring the least of the world to take care of any relationship. Because according to him, the “relational meal” is for the manager (that is to say these “nice facilitators” who spend their time managing questions of ego conflicts).

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It is when the leader finds himself confronted with his reality as a manager that the troubles will begin, because today no leader can limit himself to a role of leader and completely exclude what comes under the managerial task. Even an engineering management position requires cross-functional interaction with other departments, networking with other teams, even if it is not a “dedicated” team. The key to success in this delicate passage from controlled leadership through fair management goes through behavior and in particular by these new skills that we call “subtle” skills.

From ego to eco

The word “subtle” comes from the Latin etymology and refers to two notions: one relates to the difficulty of perception, the other to finesse and delicacy of execution. The “subtle” skills are therefore twofold: both difficult to establish by their intangible characteristics but also extremely fair, sagacious and penetrating for whoever applies them. Let’s take a leader for example who is “bathed” in his expertise. Here he is promoted to a pole of direction. However, who says “direction” necessarily says “direction of…. » and « direction on…. “. Panicked by this dimension of coercive “power”, he will find refuge in the skills “acquired” during his years of study, through scientific subjects, in order to be able to “inform” his team as well as possible. Gold, this is not what is expected of a director. Anyone who says “give the direction” must not only “inform” the direction (but a GPS can also do that) but also “be the direction”, embody it. The subtlety will reside in the fact that the followers will no longer “follow” the order dictated by the information but they will adhere by emulation effect. They will be more inclined to follow someone who knows use emotional intelligence and relationship management to better leverage the power of the collective. This is what Professor Otto Scharmer defended, in his “Theory U” at MIT, by evoking the five necessary stages of collective intelligence: observation, perception, being present, crystallization and deployment in order to bring to a stage of collective consciousness. One of the keys to collective success involves in particular “presencing”, that is to say the sagacity of a leader in full mental availability to “be completely present” to the other. “New leaders must be able to mobilize the attention of teams in favor of change without drawing too much attention to themselves,” observed Ronald Heifetz, when he was director of the educational project on leadership at Harvard University. . It is therefore to a shift from ego-centrism to eco-centrism that these different “subtle” skills invite us, which are also the reflection of a greater maturity of leadership than that which remains “top-down” and pyramidal.

spiritual leadership

The main subtlety concerning these new leadership “movements” is undoubtedly to dare to cross the field with areas of reflection that seem very far from a traditional conception: progressive leadership, emotional leadership, situational leadership, benevolent leadership… spiritual” is the best example of this in its oxymoron form. In the managerial sphere, any “spirituality” is suspect and immediately refers to a religious figure wanting to lead his flock, like a guru. As for the followers of spirituality, the word “leadership” distorts the very essence of a transcendental idea as it strikes by its resonance of profitability. “Spiritual leadership” is therefore a priori contradictory since it causes the material to collide with the immaterial. However, the popularity of the term today in business is sincere and can be explained by the need to integrate these more “subtle” criteria into the indicators of managerial success. Far from an incursion of religious dogma into the corporate sphere, “spiritual leadership” proposes to explore a more “energetic” dimension, linked to governance, which makes it possible to explain “followership” no longer as subject to a simple “technocratic” hierarchy but as a charismatic figure who embodies the messages. First mentioned by Professor Louis Fry at the University of Texas, this approach to leadership emphasizes the importance of intrinsic motivation through the values, attitudes and behaviors of the leader. It is based on a schematic modeling in the form of quadrants, just like emotional or situational intelligence.

On the one hand, we find the intra-personal order, divided into two sub-parts (self-awareness and self-control) and the interpersonal order, also divided into two sub-parts (awareness of others and relational control). . Just like for “presencing”, the starting point is always the awareness of the leader in his relationship to himself which allows him full mental availability to help cohesion, through three main components: vision, hope/ faith in the future and benevolence towards others. Highly developed abroad, spiritual leadership enjoys growing interest in France (see the research carried out within the framework of the association Spirituality at Work and Management and the book Spiritual Leadership in Practice », under the direction of Catherine Voynnet-Fourbou, EMS, 2021). We thus realized that we could not mobilize individuals without creating a relational dynamic, which is not only based on the information exchanged but also on the posture and the energy deployed. The subtlety is therefore to understand the importance of “giving of oneself” for a leader who would like to inspire followership. And this cannot be done without a clear position on the question of “self-sacrifice”, which is fundamental in spiritual leadership.

leadership from the heart

The “gift of oneself” does not mean “forgetting oneself in the other”. The leader of today cannot allow himself a sacrificial posture that would be lost in an uncontrolled empathy in the face of what he is going through. He must however be in a controlled resonance with his “follower”, in a kind of “heart to heart” which will allow him to better understand the ecology of his system. He will be able to do what is called a “social permaculture”, by proposing a symbiotic economic approach, ie by linking intellect and personal responsibility towards the collective. As Isabelle Delannoy advocates in her book ” The Symbiotic Economy (Actes Sud, 2017), the symbiotic economy is based on the symbiosis between human intelligence, the power of ecosystems and tools. The challenge is to find the right balance so as not to produce by depleting resources but by regenerating them. From a leadership point of view, how to succeed in making the system work without burnout either for the leader or for the “followers”. This is also what the Belgian industrialist Gunther Pauli advocates, when he speaks of the “blue or regenerative economy” (inspired by ecosystems, this concept is characterized by the recycling of waste by a chain of actors providing each time an added value to them. Thus the waste of some is the raw material of others). How to apply the subtlety that we find at the very heart of the genius of the living in order to draw inspiration from it at the corporate level (the Heartfulness movement starts from this ambition, by regularly intervening in companies for meditations starting from the heart). How to reconsider what we think is at the bottom of the scale in a systemic conception and, on the contrary, make it the very engine of a humanist “recycling” economy. In this sense, the leader and the “follower” are in fact two sides of the same coin that make the economy run. Giving pride to one can have virtues on the other since both are intimately connected. This is called “leadership from the heart”: not only humane and benevolent leadership but also which refers to the “courage” to be oneself in front of others, and for others. Would this subtle “heartificial intelligence” come to save leadership from the dehumanization of “artificial intelligence”, while waiting for leaders to have an NFT rating? It is very possible.